The plant collections of the Smithsonian Institution began with the acquisition of specimens collected by the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842). These formed the foundation of a National Herbarium which today numbers over 5 million historical plant records, placing it among the world's largest and most important.

Over 1.2 million specimen records (including over 105,000 type specimens with images) are currently available in this online catalog.

Search the Botany Collections

Select a tab on this page to search by Keyword or Selected Fields. If you don't know what you want to see, you may want to look at the sample records in the Quick Browse section below. Searches are limited to 10000 records and the results are sorted by taxonomic group. If you need to retrieve a larger record set, contact the Department of Botany's Data Manager.

Help

See the Help tab to learn more about searching and then exploring your returned results (sorting, exporting, etc.).

Using parentheses to clarify the logic, you can create complex queries with OR and NOT (here capital letters are required, otherwise they will be treated as keyword terms).

You can also use double-quotes to specify terms that should be treated as one.

Lastly, you can include the terms image(s) or type(s) to find records that have images or that are type specimens.

Note that searching for common (vernacular) names may not yield the expected results. Associating common names with specimen records is a work in progress.

Keyword search example:marantaceae ("new guinea" OR australia) images

Use the By Field search to find specimen data that match values in specific database fields. Enter a value or choose one from the dropdown lists.

Click the Search button to initiate a search. Clear resets all fields.

Some lists are linked, so for example, choosing a Country narrows the choices for Province/State/Territory, and District/County. Dropdown choices also narrow as you type, for example, typing zing in the Family field might narrow the choice to Zingiberaceae.

Check Only Records with Images if you want to restrict the search to records with multimedia content.

You will receive a warning when you enter invalid information in the text fields. For example, Catalog Numbers are composed strictly of letters and numbers; other characters raise a warning.

The results of your searches can be displayed in Grid (a sortable, customizable table)
, Sheet
or Gallery View (best for reviewing images). Use the Switch button to cycle between these views.

You can choose whether to display 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 records at a time.

In Sheet View:

Click on the scientific name to view the full record.

Click on the thumbnail to view larger resolutions of the image. Use Control+Click (Command+Click) to open a new browser tab.

In Grid View:

You can choose the columns to display from any column's dropdown menu (mouse into a column header and click the dropdown icon). Under Columns, click the name to display or hide the field (you do not need to click the checkbox specifically).

You can drag a column header to change its order of appearance in the grid.

You can also drag the edge of a column to make it wider or narrower.

Click in the expansion () column to view the full record.

In Gallery View:

Click the image to view the full record.

See Exporting Results for information on downloading results to, for example, Excel or Google Earth.

Open the full collection record by clicking the expansion button () in Grid View,
on the scientific name in Sheet View,
or anywhere within the image frame in Gallery View. Inverse expansion buttons () indicate records with multimedia (typically, images).

In the Record window, metadata for the multimedia content is available when you mouseover the thumbnail.

Clicking the thumbnail opens the content in your browser or other appropriate application.

Record windows may be resized or moved within the browser window.

You may have up to ten Record windows open at any one time.

Sort results in Grid View by clicking the column header (or by choosing Sort from the column's dropdown menu).

Sort on multiple columns by consecutively sorting columns in reverse order. For example, to view results sorted by Country and Province/State, first sort by Province/State and then sort again by Country.

For any column you can choose to sort in Ascending or Descending order.

Export all or selected results by clicking the Export Results as CSV button in the bottom toolbar in Grid,
Sheet,
or Gallery View.

Select individual records for Export by checking the export selection box (along the left edge of the Grid View grid).

Clear all selections with the Clear Selections button in the bottom toolbar.

Results are exported as comma-separated-values, one record per line, which can be saved to disk or opened directly with applications such as Microsoft Excel.

You can also export all or selected results to a KML file for viewing with Google Earth or other KML viewers, by clicking the Export as KML button. This button is grayed when all or selected results lack latitude/longitude values.

To create a link to specific records at NMNH provide the appropriate unit and querystring to:

http://collections.mnh.si.edu/search/UNIT/?QUERYSTRING

where UNIT is:

anth, birds, botany, ento, fishes, herps, iz, mammals, ms, or paleo

and QUERYSTRING is (use a plus-sign to separate words):

One or more CATALOG NUMBERS, e.g.

mammals/?nb=98312+A884

paleo/?nb=v4734

One or more BARCODES, e.g.

anth/?bc=e2457-0

botany/?bc=00007842+00588979

The NAME of a TYPE specimen, e.g.:

birds/?qt=corvus+corax

herps/?qt=bottae

paleo/?qt=canis+edwardii

The NAME of a specimen or object, e.g.:

anth/?qn=woven+basket

ento/?qn=musca+domestica

fishes/?qn=ablabys

ms/?qn=new+concord

The NAME (qn) and/or FAMILY (fm) and/or TYPE STATUS (ts) of a specimen, and/or its COLLECTOR (cr), and/or the COLLECTION (cn) it is part of, e.g.:

iz/?q=qn+torre+bartsch+ts+holotype+cn+henderson+collection+cr+webb

(Holotypes whose name includes Torre and Bartsch collected by Webb and part of the Henderson Collection)

To open the Collections Search to a specific search tab, e.g.

iz/?ti=1 (Invertebrate Zoology Keywords Search)

mammals/?ti=3 (Mammals Whale Collection Search)

Tabs are numbered left to right, beginning with zero.

Here are a few search tips:

Query results are limited to 5000 records. Avoid very general queries that return large numbers of records, e.g. searching for poaceae.

You can choose which columns to display in the Grid View of your search results. Move your pointer to any column header and click on the dropdown arrow. Scroll to Columns and then check or uncheck column names to show or hide those columns in the grid.

Please use the Feedback page to report back any problems you find with the data, or with using these search pages.